Everyone loves a personality test. Whether for fun, or to better asses our skills as part of choosing a career, we all love hearing about how others perceive us, how we function, and how we are likely to react in situations. We are all naturally narcissistic (up to a point) and it is at this point that Traity, a Seedcamp company that specialises in helping its users figure out how they rank in a variety of psychometric test (think of them as a more thoroughly complete Myers-Briggs test), helps users identify their core attributes as ranked by people in their social graph.

For the purpose of simplicity when speaking of Traity’s technology, I’ll use the term ‘personality test’ loosely, however, what was confusing for the founders was that while ‘personality tests’ are generally well received and actually fun for many (as in magazines or online for example), Traity struggled quite a bit, in their early days, in converting people to use their service because their personality test, while far more accurate and useful than those you take online where you assess yourself, requires you to have had your friend assess you as part of their process.

Traity was having a classical conversion/acquisition problem. Traity’s CEO, Juan Cartagena, could funnel people to his website, but couldn’t get them to go through the sign up process and then get others to sign up (which he needs as part of his product). So he went on a mission to find out how to optimise this. Here the video of Juan sharing his story of discovery (it is embedded at the bottom of this post for your convenience).

After this video came out, I recently had the chance to catch up with Juan and ask him if he could help me summarise how he worked his way through to where he is now. Firstly, he told me it all started with a chat with social games guru Blake Commagere (http://www.crunchbase.com/person/blake-commagere), who pointed him in the right direction…

Next, he identified the key metric he wanted to optimise around. In his words: “There is generally one key metric for every business that matters- optimise around that metric.”

He then decided to experiment with design as a key growth driver vs. the traditional MBA-type solutions which, until then, had not been working for him. For the record, Juan has an MBA from the Chicago Booth School of Management. One of the top MBA programs in the world, so for him to make a jump like this, really does mean a lot in terms of not adhering to ‘traditional-type’ thinking.

He then further committed to this path of experimentation by reading two books which greatly influenced his thinking on how to further evolve his customer acquisition process:

After having read both books, he went through each one of the key influence factors outlined in the book and scoured through his product to see how we could apply the concepts. Once identified, he then went about applying the appropriate design principles to yield the ultimate effect on the influence factors.

For your reference, the key influence factors highlighted in Caldini’s book on Influence include:

Reciprocation

Social Proof

Commitment & Consistency

Liking

Authority

Scarcity

Before proceeding any further, I should state that in order to better apply these concepts, that you understand what your Minimum Viable Segment (MVS) is. Without understanding your MVS, any optimization of design or messaging will likely not be targeted enough to yield directionally measurable results. For a primer on an MVS, go to Northbridge Partner, Michael Skok‘s site here: http://www.mjskok.com/resource/gtm-segmentation

The design process Juan subsequently followed, included not just the obvious making of buttons, bigger, correctly placed, or prettier or red (one of the points he mentioned about colors and engagement) or choosing a different logo, but more importantly in coming up with the correct messaging to convey the influence factors he was trying to exploit. This is crucial. The messaging is just as important, if not more, than the more traditionally-experimented visual elements of design. Although not from the books that Juan mentioned, two good books to get you thinking about how messaging matters for positioning and differentiation are:

As far as Juan’s design focus, think about it this way, he moved away from just building a more explosive gunpowder to thinking more about how to package and propel it forward (otherwise all you have is explosive gunpowder that will explode in your face).

Although it seems obvious when you read this, Juan discovered that a key aspect of using both influence and design as part of evolving his process, was understanding that his costs of user acquisition would go down the more his viral acquisition would go up, and in order to scale this virality he would need to leverage the emotions of users to have a stronger reaction. However, I’d venture to say that many don’t consider this as part of their design process, Juan admits he didn’t at first.

Specifically, Juan saw how, via design, narcissism and voyeurism was used by sites like Facebook & LinkedIn to yield frequent use, fear of missing out by sites like Instagram, Twitter, and Groupon, and Inspiration by brands like Coca-Cola. He set out to understand how he could leverage these feelings as part of creating better copy on his site’s messaging to both yield better conversion but also more virality.

Lastly, because without metrics you are just flying blind, Juan used Kissmetrics to analyse his efforts and truly understand whether his changes across the board were yielding his desired results. Build, Measure, Learn… Build, Measure, Learn.

In summary, if you have identified a real need within a market and built something awesome (gunpowder) but you just can’t seem to reach your customers, perhaps go through the journey Juan went through and assess whether perhaps the issue isn’t what your product does, but rather how you are presenting it to your users.